This study follows a local environmental group as it shapes a civic identity, before and after a municipal election, towards taking up a speaking position within the participation framework of city governance. This is an exploration and analysis of the tense co-existence of conflicting, oppositional identities, of marginality and power, in the context of local environmental conflict. The cen- tral question revolves around how this local group participates in the construc- tion of civic discourse and community knowledge to build its political capital, and how, at the same time, it retains its activist discourse and marginal identity. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to current interdisciplinary scholar- ship on the issue of public participation in government decision-making and discourse studies on marginal identities and identity development. In this con- text, it is an effort to provide an analysis of how discursive rhetorical strategy functions in civic identity development and how the management of available discursive resources can enable citizen participation without disabling an activ- ist identity.
Studies of public participation in environmental decision-making have found that local democratic political processes in environmental contexts are often dysfunctional. Such studies have, for the most part, yielded scenarios of
unproductive processes of public participation, usually generating frustration among citizens, and deadlocking opposition between activists and government/ industry. For example, in a study of the U.S. Forest Service’s approach to public involvement, Walker (2004) found that, while the Forest Service propounded the importance of collaboration as a matter of policy, in practice it actually dis- couraged public engagement (p. 134). In a separate study of the Forest Service, Schwarze (2004) found that Forest Service management is over-preoccupied with the regulatory mechanisms for public discourse, with the result that there is now “a trained incapacity” among employees and management for address- ing the question of legitimate public input (p. 154). In another study, Gregory (2001) found that citizens experienced the official body of the port authority as “not only elusive and unaccountable but also ... to be in the service of urban development policies promoting ... ‘outside’ economic interests of ... elites” (p. 143). Gregory concluded that these residents became shut out of public par- ticipation because the port authority ultimately “governed the political arena of neighborhood activism” and what was permitted to be “the politically sayable” in public debate (p. 167). Having studied a number of these cases, Depoe and Delicath (2004) concluded that public participation in environmental decision- making fails because community input often solicited by public officials is not allowed to affect “policy choices or regulatory outcomes” (p. 10). Similarly, based on her study of stakeholders in such processes of public input, Senecah (2004) found that they felt that their involvement was not “productive or meaningful” and that “the public had no voice” (p. 19). Indeed, those working in forest policy and research themselves have acknowledged the perception that community in- put has been futile in most processes of public participation:
In the past, federal agencies like the Forest Service and the Bu- reau of Land Management have failed to successfully involve the public in natural resource planning and decisions. Com- munity-based practitioners feel—after two decades of “public involvement” in which their comments have been synthesized, coded, counted, considered too late, or taken out of context— they have had little or no impact on what happens to the for- ests that surround them. (Gray & Kusel, 1998, p. 28)
Although not great in number, there are some encouraging stories of en- vironmental activism. For example, Ingham (1996) reports on the rhetorical sophistication of the Beartooth Front Alliance and its consequent success in protecting the environment of the community of Red Lodge. Cooper (1996) applauds the successes of the Nature Conservancy and its efforts to include
“both protesters and accommodators” in the process of environmental change (p. 256). Clearly, the rhetorical work of activists in these sensitive contexts need not always be thwarted by dismissive official processes or lead to deadlock and stalemate. This paper is intended to contribute to these studies and to deepen our understanding of how, in contexts of environmental conflict, productive knowledge building of accounts which are critical of government and lead to change may occur, and how it can occur without repudiating an activist iden- tity. How do non-mainstream individuals and groups both effectively mobilize those features of a dominant discourse to receive recognition or acceptance by the dominant group, and, at the same time, sustain those transgressive features of discourse that are critical to their identity?
This question evolved as I studied the ongoing activities of a local environ- mental group over its third year of existence, from 2005 to 2006. The question owes much of its formulation to the work of Holland and Lave (2001), who ask how “people [can] act so as to foreground one kind of identity over others in local contentious practice, and at the same time act in ways saturated with other identity practices” (p. 26). By the end of the group’s first two years (2005), my findings suggested that its members might become stuck with the dead-end effects of a polarizing activist discourse that precludes genuine public input. As the study proceeded into the group’s third year, however, my findings began to suggest not a polarization but a co-existence of opposing discourses, inviting more focus on the constructive possibilities for such co-existence as an alterna- tive to the usual scenarios of confrontation between activist citizens and their governments.
By the end of the third year, I found that the group’s most effective strategy was its contributions to community knowledge-making. In the context of an election campaign, the group collaborated with other environmentalist groups to develop a community message that candidates would listen to. This message construction fostered the group’s civic identity and its realization of the larger goal of entering civic discourse on environmental decision-making. In effect, as a basis for broader political support, the group contributed to the building of community knowledge that led to widespread awareness and concern over the mayor-in-council’s cavalier dismissal of public input into land use decisions. Its efforts involved the strategic use of resources available from both activist and civic discourses to build community knowledge through the production and reproduction of certain community “sayings,” and thereby to create its linguis- tic capital. This work entailed using the tactics of reported speech to produce linguistic expressions suitable for the linguistic market. The group’s goal was to make its account of the city’s “deafness” to public input on the develop- ment of natural areas prevail as community knowledge, and thereby achieve
“acceptability” in the “market” of city politics (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 81). As a result, when the city’s participation framework shifted with electoral change, the group became aligned with the new, salient account of events, and it had sufficient political capital to take up a speaking position afforded within this changed market. At the same time, the group protected a more transgressive discourse and hard-won activist identity, an identity that government repre- sentatives seemed to tolerate, and even accept, in meetings with the group. The group had fashioned a civic identity for itself and sustained its more activist identity and discourse.
To demonstrate how this group motivated and participated in the construc- tion of community knowledge, and how it constructed its civic identity, I have adopted a theoretical framework that incorporates analyses of discursive conflict, identity development (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Holland & Lave, 2001), and knowledge construction as discursive formation (Foucault, 1972 a, 1972b). This framework is also applied to an analysis of how and why the group sustained its activist identity even as it achieved a civic speaking posi- tion. In what follows, I first provide a brief background of the group and the issues at stake, then elaborate the theoretical framework, describe my research methodology, and discuss the findings of the study. I have drawn on represen- tative discursive events, both pre- and post-election, to illustrate the group’s management of its civic identity, and the co-existing persistence of its activist identity.